Once again, ubunutu is lacking

[Beve Stallmer]

I must be a masochist I guess, bec I keep trying this stuff. Every few years I give Linux a go, each time I end up walking away shaking my head in disbelief.

This time I tried the new Live beta disc on my 4 year old Dell laptop. To my amazement it loaded perfectly, so I installed it, using the whole disk.

I was soon listening to mp3s and watching videos, although I noticed that it kept wanting to load huge updates from the Internet (very slowly btw, 28kbps max) and transfers from my other laptop running Vista were awful (10 mins to transfer a 10MB mp3 file!)

Another problem I noticed was that the default wireless settings were not saved (set it to WPA2 personal, and every time I come back to it it's reverted to WPA personal).

Anyhoo, messing about with the desktop settings, I saw that I was offered several setting for the video card, from basic effects to advanced settings.

Now this laptop has a Nvidia FX Geforce 5200 card, but I was not able to select anything but the most basic screen effects (ie no effects at all). I then saw that the drivers installed were for the "new" NVidia cards, which mine is not. So I foolishly but innocently went to the add/change update manager and deselected the "new" driver and selected the ordinary nvidia drivers, hoping this would allow me to use the card a bit better. I did not select the legacy driver.

It complained a bit about "first uninstall/delete that before you download this", so I followed that, then before downloading the new drivers I put the lappy into Hibernate.

Coming back the next morning, I tried to wake it up and ended up with a screen that was just lines and weird slowly changing colors, like the screen was burning!

From that point on it kept rebooting itself, unable to get into X, spent 2 hours trying all the advice on this forum, running commands from the CLI to reconfigure, still no startx, and when I eventually tried to re-install the whole shebang from the Live CD, it also now just gives me diagonal lines across the screen after the first few screens, which means it's probably damaged the card, because it never did that the first time.

So it's still amateur hour with Linux, but I do detect some improvements.

[Pumalite]

That's Linux; you can fool around with it until you break it.

[Beve Stallmer]

Changing the video driver shouldn't break it. Never has with the other OSes I've used.

[Pumalite]

Sure you can do it installing the wrong driver or not installing it right. You had a working system. What happened?.

[Beve Stallmer]

Read above; tried to use the right driver for the card, disaster. Not an uncommon experience, looking at other threads.

[Beve Stallmer]

Re-installing the Redmond Beast OS on the Dell as we chat here ... looking at the bloody Windows waving corporate flag as a write, lol.

Oh Linux, you are a disappointment.

[BLTicklemonster]

It's a new driver. I have the fx 5200 and use the nvidia-glx-new drivers and everything is fine here. Not sure what you ran into, but don't give up.

[Shazaam]

Read above; tried to use the right driver for the card, disaster. Not an uncommon experience, looking at other threads.

So installing the wrong (by your admission) video driver isn't supposed to break X? How does that work in ANY distro?
Oh, and Uncle Bill is laughing all the way to the bank.

[picopir8]

So let me summarize. You download the BETA version of ubuntu and then complain about problems and that there are lots of updates.

Do you mix up cake mix then eat it before it goes in the oven and complain that its to soggy? Do you show up to work 2 hours early and complain that nobody else is at work?

BTW...
Changing a video driver will not break any flavor of Linux. You can always boot to a command line, uninstall the bad driver, then install the correct driver. If the wrong driver gets installed in any other OS, the same procedure is needed (ie booting to safe mode with windows). If you truly had a wrong video driver loaded in Windows, there is no possible way you would have a display unless the wrong driver was compatible with your video card.

[Beve Stallmer]

This beta is almost a final version. The uninstall at command line stuff didn't work for me. Yes, changing the driver DID break this installation, and I'm NOT the only one to have this happen. LOL, the denial is amazing!

Give it another go? I tried, but this time the installation CD could not get the screen to work, just shows diagonal lines when it tries to start the window manager. It must be picking up some bad config data off the hard drive, bec. it never did that the first time!